UPDATE
Unsustainable Tower of Babel
Barely a hundred days before the biggest environmental event of the decade takes place in Johannesburg, negotiators are floundering in a sea of unpromising text. Three preparatory committee (prepcom) meetings have resulted in little more than a shopping list of issues that need to be addressed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (wssd) in August this year. The list includes poverty, globalisation and poverty, unsustainable production and consumption patterns, resource efficiency, health and governance. "Sadly, the answers governments seem likely to give to this ambitious list are the wrong ones,' says Daniel Mittler from Friends of the Earth International (foei).

Take global environmental governance, for example. There has been increasing global recognition in recent years that the giant web of un environment and development organisations, international financial institutions and the World Trade Organisation (wto) need streamlining and restructuring to foster accountability while avoiding duplication in their work. Also, that the institutional structure for environmental governance has to be made powerful enough to withstand constant battering from supporters of free and unrestrained trade.

But the text on creating an institutional framework for sustainable development that will be negotiated at the next prepcom is disappointing. It hardly addresses streamlining or accountability, meekly suggesting